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Garshasp: The Monster Slayer

In a week from now, the next major Ogre powered game will finally be released. We had the chance to get some up-front information and material that we are happy to share here. So what are we talking about?

Garshasp: The Monster Slayer

“This game is based on ancient Persian mythology bringing to life the epic battles of the mythological hero, Garshasp, in the ancient lands against the evil monsters. You play as Garshasp himself, the strongest man in Persian Mythology, in a journey to revenge and reclaim the legendary mace of his ancestors which is stolen by the Deevs. A journey which proves to unlock more significant hidden mysteries. The main mechanics of the game revolve around melee combat, platforming and exploration.”

The game was developed and published by the studio “DeadMage“, with a core team of nine people: 3 programmers, one concept artist, an 3D modeler, 2 game designers, one sound guy and an animator. Overall 30 people were ultimately involved in the process. Together they worked on it for 3 years, albeit most of the time part time, since the team members had to make a living or study at the same time.

The also used quite a range of different libarries to get the game done, most notably: OGRE3D 1.6.2, ParticleUniverse, PhysX 2.7.2 (via NxOgre 0.9), Hikari, Boost (Serialization, Threading), CG shaders SM 2.x, OpenAL, FreeSL, OgreVideo and Theora. The CG shaders were used to achieve per pixel lighting, normal/specular mapping, HDR, shadows, vegetation/flag subtle movements, water and hardware skinning.

As for their overall development tools they used Visual Studio 2008, PIX, 3D Max for character design, environment design and animation along with Photoshop, Crazybump and ZBrush. The 3D content was exported by the use of oFusion and OgreMax.

To arrange the assets and create the scenes, they built their own level editor using native C++ and WxWidgets which proved to be a good decision in the long run. They also came up with an own scripting language for their game designers.

So if you are into that kind of game, you should definetly give it a try. You can grab it via Steam or GamersGate.